Lágbájá - Nigeria

Before chancing on a random torrent a few weeks back, I had heard none of this music, and the artist name of Lágbájá was new to me.  But I am now a fan and, out of the selection available to me for listening and study, these are the 26 tracks which hit me the best and the sweetest and the most serious.

Here’s what I have learned:

Our most effective English translation of the Yoruba “lágbájá” would be “anonymous”. Lagos-born Bisade Ologunde adopted it as his name on behalf of the faceless and voiceless, and performs in a mask to underline his identification as: 'The man without a face who speaks for the people without a voice'.

Like his old friend Fela Kuti, he presents political and social comment using a colloquial urban blend of English and Yoruba, adding costumes and production design that make connections to the ancient tradition of Egungun – the ancestral spirits who guide the people towards peace and truth.

The music uses singers and western horns, with guitars and keyboards, over a central percussion ensemble of traditional drums, and mixes traditional Yoruba music with Afro-pop styles of juju, west-coast high-life, and Fela’s afro-beat, all blended together with large dollops of funk and jazz.

Also like Fela, Lágbájá plays saxophone – only much better.
(Thankfully.)

And I greatly respect and appreciate the triumph of Yoruba roots and the rhythm culture of interlocking interdependence over the simplifying tendencies of western pop, and how – even in his most contemporary incarnations of Quincy-Jones-standard modernity – the traditional remains central.   “Konko Below” for example, which I think for some reason might be the most recent track here, is one which flirts easily with a style cliché or two out of rap/R&B convention, yet still it is impossible to deny the Yoruba drums pulsing at its heart.

But it seems as if the current ascendancy of the hip-hop aesthetic, driven by the rise of Naija nu-stars like 9ice or 2 Face Idibia or Terry G, may have re-cast the masked-one now as old-hat.  A musicologically principled distance from the more faddishly en vogue currents, together with his pecuniary frustrations over the encroachments of technology and free-downloading, might help explain why he seems to have released little these days.

With performance success in Ghana, France, Brazil and Britain, a chance for the international market that all African artistes hunger for, and an AllMusic.com biography which has him “based in Manhattan”, he has been subject to critique based on an expatriate absence which he denies, claiming to be always home in Lagos where - also vaguely reminiscent of Fela - he has a club.

His club-concept is named Motherlan’ and aims to follow village-square traditions of being a community gathering-place for a range of artistic and devotional events like dance, and story-telling, and ceremonies in the moonlight.

There is YouTubery under the same name.
You should check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Motherlan

Lazz’s Lágbájá Collection (at a dissatisfying mixture of low and lower kbps, but the brilliance of the music still shines through) 
187.2 MB 
https://mega.co.nz/#!WVAB3a4A!B9o3vg9Kh9Xai6MIPD-Q1IMQEyooh6y5zwQJUGnHkio